Homesteading

For as long as I can remember, I have had problems with strong scents in things like perfumes, colognes, lotions, and hand soaps. This problem got considerably worse when I got pregnant with our first child and has gotten worse still after the birth of our third child. When we end up sitting behind that sweet, older woman at church that wears way too much perfume, it’s all I can do to breathe, let alone keep from sneezing uncontrollably! In addition to the sneezing and watery eyes that I get when I am around scented perfumes and colognes, I also get dry and cracked skin when I use lotions or hand soaps that contain strong fragrances.

In order to combat this problem, I had stopped using any sort of perfume or body spray on myself (I never was much of a perfume person but I did enjoy using lemon or coconut-scented body sprays) and have tried just about every sort of “natural” lotion and hand soap that I could find. For me, this has been a long journey – over the course of five years or more – and, at this point, I have found that it is easier, cheaper, and more effective to just make my own hand soap and body spray. And I promise you, it is super easy and quick – otherwise, I would not have kept up with it all this time!

I do still purchase body lotion – mostly just because the recipes for homemade lotion are a bit more involved and I haven’t been able to keep up with my usage – but I always look for the “fragrance-free” option and make sure that I double check the specific product on ewg.org before purchasing.

[Side note: The Environmental Working Group (ewg.org) is a wonderful website that is run by a non-partisan group of researchers (in other words, not affiliated with or funded by a certain company or business sector, which would inevitably lead to a bias in the findings) who do extensive testing on food, cleaning, and personal care products and report their findings by attaching a grade to each product and listing any offending ingredients that you might have concerns about – either because it may be carcinogenic, a hormone disruptor, a known allergen, or harmful to the environment. Overall, a great way to make sure you are buying the best product out there for our bodies and for the environment! Check it out!]

Here are my tried and true recipes for hand soap and body spray that can easily be personalized by choosing essential oils in your favorite scents!

Pour castile soap and water into a hand soap container with the foaming pump on top. *This is important – you must use a foaming hand soap container in order to make this work.* If desired, add several drops of your favorite essential oil (start with 5-10 drops and see what you think…with essential oils, a little bit goes a long way!). I also frequently make this hand soap recipe with no essential oils at all and it still works great!

[For the castile soap, I use Dr. Bronner’s 18-in-1 Hemp Unscented Baby-Mild Pure-Castile Soap made with organic oils. I buy this by the gallon (at $37.43/gallon) and use it for hand soap as well as mopping our hardwood and bamboo floors. I buy the unscented version but Dr. Bronner’s also makes scented liquid castile soap if you prefer to buy it that way.]

If you’re not sure where to start with the essential oils, just think of your current favorite hand soap and try to mimic the scent. My favorite ones are grapefruit and bergamot for the bathroom sinks (because I love the Kiss My Face soap with that scent), or lemongrass, or peppermint, or I like to use a combination of citrus oils like lemon, sweet orange, and grapefruit for the kitchen sink. It’s fun to play around with the essential oils and make your own favorite scent!

Mix all of the ingredients in a glass bottle with a spritzer top. (You can purchase these bottles pretty inexpensively online.) Once again, play around with the essential oils to make your own unique scent!

We have been experiencing some unseasonably warm temperatures in Eastern PA, with the high reaching 68°F just last weekend. It’s amazing!! The past few winters have been really rough so this is a nice break and we are trying our best to take full advantage of the mild weather. This past weekend, we went for a family hike on the trails at South Mountain in Emmaus and then grilled some of our home-grown rabbit meat for dinner. The last time we had this meal was in the summer and I didn’t expect to be able to break it out again until next summer. But since we just harvested the last of our rabbits for the year, I thought I would take this chance to marinate two of them, wrap them in bacon, and grill them up. Yum!

For those of you who don’t know, we raise meat rabbits on our little homestead. We started two seasons ago and have averaged about 12 rabbits – or 35-40lbs of meat – per season each of those years. We’ve had a lot of learning experiences over this period and hope to be able to yield even more next year. For example, a fun fact…I learned that a female rabbit actually has two uteruses (or uteri?) and…get this…she can be pregnant with a full kit (which usually yields about 6-8 baby bunnies) and then get pregnant AGAIN – as in AT THE SAME TIME – using the second uterus! Crazy! Talk about a Super Mom! So it’s true what they say about “reproducing like rabbits”. These things are nuts. We have never made use of this back-up uterus because, first of all, it seems a little bit cruel and, also, we’re working on getting good at single uterus production first. One thing at a time, please. Even so, the same Mama rabbit can get pregnant, deliver the bunnies, and then go through the whole process again in the same season and all of the bunnies will still be full grown by harvest time in the fall. So, we could potentially get 12 rabbits or more from each of our two female rabbits in a season. Like I said, we’re working our way up to this…hopefully next year. We currently have one male and two female rabbits and these are considered our breeding rabbits. We keep these around from year to year. We breed them in the very early spring to try and time the delivery around mid-to-late April when the temperatures are starting to warm up. The mommies are pregnant for 30-31 days. When the bunnies are born, their eyes are closed and they don’t have much fur to speak of so they just sort of huddle together in a big clump in the nesting box for a week or so. In the beginning, they nurse from their mother. Eventually, they will start to eat on their own and grow like crazy. In just 14-16 weeks, they will be full grown and ready to harvest. (You can continue to keep and feed them after this point and they will gain a little more weight but will also consume a lot more feed at a lower conversion ratio.) Since we raise meat rabbits, their full grown weight will be around 5-7lbs at harvest time and will yield about 2-4lbs of meat each. Our biggest rabbit was around 5lbs dressed, but that was an 18-month old male who we thought was a female and bit Joe’s finger when he tried to separate it from another male, earning it a one-way ticket to the freezer!

Here are some other fun facts (or “learning experiences”, as we like to call them) that came to light during our first two seasons of breeding and raising rabbits for meat:

You should carefully monitor and limit the amount of breeding action, if you will, that a male rabbit experiences in a single day. Case in point…our very first attempt at breeding involved giving one of our Daddy rabbits a chance to spend some time with each of the Mama rabbits in a homemade mobile pen out in the yard. Keep in mind that rabbits don’t care much for wooing and flowers and chocolates and making a girl feel special. They just get right down to business and go at it over and over again for as long as you will let it continue. So after many rounds of this breeding procedure that we came up with, we put the rabbits back into their separated sections of the main rabbit hutch. Later that same night, the Daddy rabbit had a heart attack and died. Whoops! A little too much action for the big guy! Lesson learned.

It is REALLY difficult to tell male and female rabbits apart. As young bunnies, it is nearly impossible. But even after being full grown, it is still really hard to tell one from the other. We had one case where we thought we had the male and female rabbits separated into their respective factions only to find that one of the “Daddy” rabbits turned up pregnant! So either we got a really special rabbit or we messed up the sexing.

Rabbits can have a false pregnancy where they put on weight and pull out their fur to make a nest, just like they would if they were actually pregnant. But, alas, no bunnies will appear.

It’s not good to deliver babies in January, but rabbits don’t know that and will mate if you put them in the same cage in the greenhouse when trying to protect them from a -15°F polar vortex.

As mentioned above, it is hard to tell male rabbits from female rabbits, and when you get that wrong and try to mate boy rabbits with other boy rabbits, they play what looks like a funny game of chase the tail, but really they are trying to castrate each other. Yikes! They also bite really hard when you try to break them up (drawing blood through a leather glove). And once you do break them up, they hold a grudge and will rip through wire mesh to get to their new nemesis. Boys! They cause such trouble!

Their manure is like brown gold…full of nutrients and does not require any composting prior to adding to garden beds (unlike chicken manure, which is too “hot” with nitrogen to be directly added and requires “resting” prior to using as a fertilizer). Also, their manure is apparently like candies to dogs…we are pretty sure this made up our dog’s primary diet for most of the summer. Yuck.

So there…I hope I just told you all that you wanted (or didn’t even know that you wanted) to know about raising meat rabbits! And, if you ever find yourself with some rabbit meat, here is our favorite way to prepare it…

Using a mortar and pestle (because it’s fun) or a small food processor, grind up the fresh herbs with the garlic and lemon zest.

Transfer to a small bowl and whisk in the olive oil, lemon juice, and honey.

Place the rabbit pieces in a glass dish and pour the marinade over top. Cover and refrigerate all day (or as long as you have until dinner).

About an hour before dinner, fire up the grill on medium heat and take the meat out of the refrigerator and remove from the marinade.

Wrap one or two slices of bacon around as many pieces as you can and secure them with toothpicks. Try to at least wrap up the loin and back leg pieces. The front legs are very small and the belly doesn’t need it because it’s considered “rabbit bacon” all on its own.

Grill over medium heat for about 10-20 minutes, turning often and removing the smaller pieces first as they are cooked through. The belly and front legs will cook rather quickly and the thicker pieces with bones will take a bit longer.

Serve with your favorite seasonal veggies. (We used roasted acorn squash from our local CSA and some peas from a bag in the freezer section of our grocery store. Hey, we do our best but we sure love green peas and haven’t found a good way to buy, harvest, or preserve peas from a local source. It was our 4-year old’s idea to serve the peas inside of the acorn squash halves and everyone loved it!)

Notes

You could also prepare this recipe in the oven at 400°F by roasting for the same amount of time. Be sure to keep an eye on the meat so that it doesn’t get overcooked. You may want to turn it a couple of times during the roasting process and you could even baste the meat with the leftover marinade.

Serves: 6-8

Life From Scratch http://lifefromscratch.com/

P.S…you can find excellent instructions on how to cut up a rabbit here, if you find yourself in such a situation…